Terraform is the tool that lets you manage your cloud infrastructure with code. Instead of clicking through the AWS or Google Cloud console to create servers, databases, and networks, you describe what you want in a text file, and Terraform creates it for you. It is made by HashiCorp, and it has become the standard way teams manage infrastructure: the same file can build your entire setup, on any cloud, again and again, exactly the same way.

How does Terraform work? You write configuration files in HCL, HashiCorp's simple language, describing resources — a virtual server, a storage bucket, a database. Terraform compares your files with what actually exists in the cloud, shows you a plan of what it will create, change, or delete, and only applies the changes when you approve. It keeps a state file that records what it manages, so it knows what already exists.…